'I was terrified that the guards would come in and teach me a lesson'

Speaking for the first time of her ordeal, Gillian Gibbons, the woman jailed for naming a teddy bear Mohammed, tells Elizabeth Day of her eight days of fear in a Sudan cell as angry mobs demanded her death for 'blasphemy'

Still now, she sees the darkened silhouette of a prison guard every time she closes her eyes. She remembers, too, the distinctive clattering sound each time a guard would doze off in the midday heat, relax his grip and let his machine gun fall to the tiled floor. She can recall the dirt, the sweat, the heat and, through it all, the sheer sense of terror and incomprehension. 'It's hard to describe really, quite what it's like. I was just terrified, absolutely terrified.'

Until last week Gillian Gibbons was an ordinary schoolteacher from Liverpool; a 54-year-old mother of two whose closest brush with the law had been a parking ticket 20 years ago. But when, in August, she took up a job teaching primary school children in Sudan, she set in motion an extraordinary chain of events. Within months she became the focus of hatred for a machete-wielding mob demanding her execution, while government officials pursued high-level diplomatic negotiations to secure her release from jail. Her crime? To call a teddy bear Mohammed.

It would, perhaps, be easy to dismiss the whole episode as an absurd mis-understanding, an overblown skirmish soon to be rewritten as a series of banal jokes, circulated by email between bored office-workers. But for Gibbons, incarcerated for eight days in a filthy Khartoum cell with no idea when, or if, she would ever be released, it was no laughing matter.

'You start imagining all sorts,' she says. 'You start imagining that maybe some of the guards will come in and teach the blaspheming white woman a lesson.' Asked if she was referring to the fear of being raped she said, ' Yes, but I had no justification for thinking that. I was never mistreated.'

The naming of a stuffed toy by a classroom of six-year-olds seemed an unlikely tinderbox for an explosion of religious extremism. In October the bear was named Mohammed in a vote taken by Gibbons's class of 23 pupils at Unity High School in Khartoum. Sharia law, introduced in Sudan in 1991, states that any physical depiction of the Prophet is blasphemous. And yet for two months, no one complained - not a single child, parent or the Muslim classroom assistant, Dahlia.

'For the children it wasn't an animal, it was a member of the class,' says Gibbons. 'To encourage them to write, I thought it would be really nice if the bear could have a diary and could go home with the children at the weekend. But the parents had to ask, so they'd write and say "Can we borrow Mohammed?", and they're Muslim parents, so you can imagine that I had no idea at all that I'd done something wrong because none of the parents said anything. That's why I didn't twig, you see.'

It was personal animosity that was to prove Gibbons's undoing. Two months after the bear had been named, Sara Khawad, a school secretary who by her own admission bore a grudge against the headteacher, complained to the authorities. 'I was used by the secretary to get at the school,' Gibbons says. 'Otherwise I think I would have been let off with a quiet reprimand. I wouldn't want to offend anybody. It was just a complete misunderstanding, a mistake.'

The school's director, Robert Boulos, called Gibbons into his office. He accepted her immediate apology and her explanation that it had not been deliberate. But the situation had already acquired its own unstoppable momentum. Soon someone tipped off the Ministry of Education, then the police were informed and the school quickly shut down for fear of reprisal. Gibbons, caught up in circumstantial quicksands, was arrested on the morning of 25 November by five armed guards and driven to a nearby police station in a truck with blacked-out windows. 'I had nothing at all,' she says. 'I was wearing a long blue skirt and a blouse and I took a wrap with me to cover my arms.'

After several hours of interrogation, Gibbons was locked up with no explanation, unable to understand the guards' rapid-fire Arabic. 'I'd only had three Arabic lessons and we hadn't got to the bit about "What to do if you're arrested",' she says.

The open-air cell had three grey-tiled walls, a basic squat toilet in a corner and steel bars running across the facade and ceiling. 'I just stood there for three hours, thinking I was going home. It was filthy, there were ants all over the floor and in the corner there were rat droppings. There was a light shining into my yard that attracted all the mosquitoes, so I stood there and got bitten to death.

'It started to get dark about 6.30 and it got quite cold and all I had was my wrap, I didn't even have a handbag because I only thought I was going for an hour.'

At eight in the evening, a guard brought her some cheese-and-tomato sandwiches left for her by staff at the school. 'Nobody actually came to tell me that I wasn't going home, so I just guessed at that point. I was panicking and I was crying. I didn't actually sleep all night. I was so distressed, so uncomfortable and so cold, that at four in the morning I just paced round and round trying to keep warm. It felt like this was happening to someone else. It was just mad, just surreal.'

Gillian Gibbons makes an unlikely felon. A gentle, quietly spoken woman, she is dressed in a baggy black jacket and sensible flat shoes. Her dark brown hair, normally a mass of uncontrollable curls, has been straightened for the occasion and hangs lankly below her ears. Born in Sheffield, she still speaks in a slight Yorkshire accent, with the slow, precise diction of someone accustomed to communicating with children. When, last year, her 32-year marriage broke down and her much-loved older brother Stephen died from pancreatic cancer, she started to re-evaluate her life as a deputy headteacher at Dovecot Primary School in Liverpool. 'It suddenly dawned on me that I could go anywhere and do anything.' She applied to an agency that placed English teachers in foreign schools and was offered a position in Khartoum.

Her two children - John, 25, and Jessica, 27 - were both living independent lives. With nothing to hold her back, Gibbons gave up her job in July and flew to Sudan the following week to take up a post teaching the English curriculum in Unity High School, a fee-paying institution in Khartoum that caters for a mixture of Christian and Muslim middle-class families. Gibbons was given free accommodation in a school apartment and paid around £450 a month.

'People have this image of Sudan, and yes, there is a lot of famine in Africa, a lot of war, but Khartoum is a city just like Liverpool. It's dirty, it's smelly, it's a mess, but it's a wonderful place. It's exciting. It's like being in a Michael Palin film. I had a Bradt travel book and I looked on the internet [before going]. I did know a little bit about the Muslim faith because I used to teach it,' she says, freely admitting that she has never read the Koran.

'When I got there I realised it was the best thing I'd ever done and I was so happy. I'd made some really good friends, I was just settling down, I'd decorated my room, I'd bought some things from the market and hung them on the wall and it was feeling very homely, and then suddenly...'

She trails off and looks blankly out of the window into the grey Liverpool drizzle. 'My head can't cope with it at all - how we got from a teddy bear named Mohammed to people saying they should send the SAS in to rescue me.'

After five days' incarceration, with regular visits from Russell Phillips, the British consul, Gibbons was put on trial at the Khartoum North Criminal Court on 29 November.

'I went into court and I saw one of the parents of one of my children and she was smiling at me and people don't understand how much something like that means to you when you're in such a desperate state because I was terrified.'

Gibbons was allowed to make a brief statement through an interpreter. 'I admitted what I'd done. I told them I was really sorry, I tried to convince them I hadn't meant it. How can a book full of smiling, happy faces, of a photograph of a bear at a birthday party with all the candles, how could anyone construe that as being intentionally insulting?'

At times, Gibbons found herself both terrified by her situation and simultaneously bemused by its absurdity. In a moment of almost farcical surreality, the teddy bear itself made a courtroom appearance. 'This clerk of the court got this carrier bag and produced this bear with a flourish, like a rabbit out of the hat,' Gibbons recalls. 'He put it down on the table in front of us and it flopped over, and the prosecution [lawyer] sat him up. And then he pointed at this bear in a dead aggressive manner and he said "Is this the bear?" It was Exhibit A, you see. You could almost see the bear shivering, as if he was on trial as well, still in his little school shirt, sitting there looking terrified. It made me laugh, but it wasn't funny, you know what I mean?'

After 10 hours of deliberation and witness statements, the judge, Mohammed Youssef, sentenced her to 15 days in jail. Gibbons was taken back to her cell by guards. It was, she says, her lowest point. 'I wouldn't speak to any of the guards. I wouldn't even look at them because I was just in shock. I just felt that I'd been run over by 10 juggernauts.

'Sometimes the guards would come in and say "Why are you crying?", and there were some moments in that week where I would actually find that really funny, because it was the most ridiculous question you could ask. "Well, I've lost my job, I've lost my home, there's a baying mob outside wanting to kill me, I'm in prison and I'm going to get deported and you ask me why I'm crying"? '

But with the arrival at the beginning of December of two British Muslim peers, Lord Ahmed and Baroness Warsi, to negotiate for her release, Gibbons's treatment gradually improved and she was even given a bed for her last two nights in jail. 'And a loo with a seat!' she adds. 'It's amazing how luxurious a proper loo with a seat can be.'

She was never subjected to the harsh regimes of Omdurman women's prison. For her own safety she was moved to three different holding cells in various police stations around the city.

Slowly, the negotiations continued around her. After eight long days in captivity, the British consul came to tell her she had been pardoned by the Sudanese President, Omar al-Bashir. She was told that a TV press conference confirming her release would be given at 11am. The guards agreed to switch on a television set in an adjoining room but, with maddening timing, the electricity suddenly cut out just before it was due to air.

'Then there was a phone call from my headteacher [to the consul], but she didn't know I didn't know, she was just saying "Isn't it wonderful?" We were elated.'

Gibbons was driven to the airport, where she boarded a plane to Dubai with the peers who had secured her release. In the plush surroundings of the first-class cabin, she ate a meal of lobster tails and potatoes, toasting her release with a vodka and orange.

'I'm not a drinker but I felt obliged to have an alcoholic drink even though I was with Lord Ahmed and Baroness Warsi, who are Muslims. I was a bit embarrassed about it, but I thought I'd earned that vodka.'

At Dubai she was transferred to another plane, touching down at Heathrow airport at 7am last Tuesday. Her children met her as she came through the arrivals lounge. 'My daughter burst into tears and we had lots of hugs. They just said they were really glad I was home.'

She retains a remarkable lack of rancour about her ordeal and hopes to take up another foreign teaching post, possibly in China. 'I don't regret a second of it. I had a wonderful time. It was fabulous.'

Does she blame anyone for what she went through? She pauses. 'I blame myself because I shouldn't have done it,' she says finally. 'Ignorance of the law is no defence.'